On 23.5.2012 19:19 chris wrote:[CL2:DL1] 00:02
The worlds first doppelganger!

At the moment, I can only assume the form of the kobold, but even that is not so bad for a monk, especially when one considers the alternative.

I don't regenerate (hp or sp) while assuming a form, so I quickly learned that at least the weak races should not charge any upkeep at all.

Now, to seek out mushrooms!

On 23.5.2012 19:30 Arjen wrote::o sounds like a very interesting race. Can I play? :)

Btw, concerning randarts in a randart-only game. Very nice, not too overpowered, randarts. I think that the change you made is pretty well-balanced. Just to let you know. ;)

On 23.5.2012 19:39 chris wrote:You can play ... Allow me to test a bit first and work out balance issues. I had to change a *lot* of code to make this work, so there are probably a slew of bugs and I'd rather squish a few before uploading.

Actually, I will probably tweak upkeep costs down a bit more as lack of regeneration can be the main form of upkeep. Maybe only the upper tier races will have any further costs ...

The fun will start big time once I hit L17 and can become a Beastman :D

On 23.5.2012 19:54 Arjen wrote:It sounds like a very random class, I like random.

On 23.5.2012 20:24 chris wrote:[CL12:DL6] 00:28
While playing this race, it becomes obvious that Kobolds are mis-categorized wrt to xp, at least in the early going. They advance quicker than either the Snotling and the Yeek, and those two are truly pathetic by comparison. Of course, if I only had a single mushroom I might rethink this opinion.

Gnomes are good when you need FA and skeletons when you need SI. Need gold? An Ent monk is a ferocious digger! But the kobold remains my preferred form and I'm very close to L16 with that race ... enough to snag another helpful stat boost.

On 23.5.2012 21:15 chris wrote:Half-giants are now my biggest form, but the kobold is still more deadly due to extra blows. And Beastmen take a while to get a nice mutation set ... As a nature boy, I don't much need to spam double elemental resistance.

The game hasn't blown up yet, so I went ahead and uploaded 0.0.99. Please treat this as an unstable beta release and let me know if you find any bugs/quirks.

At the risk of garnering hostile boos, I removed Weight/Height/Age/Social Class from the game. Social Class only affected your starting gold and I thought the other 3 weren't used at all. But it turns out weight was used for the Trip mutation and also for determining something about riding. Anyway, I'm using the free space on the character dump for what I feel to be more useful information. I never liked the game having things that don't affect gameplay (Why not tell me what color eyes I have?) and it always bugged me that my age would not increase even after thousands of game days of scumming!

So far, doppelgangers are good fun :D

On 23.5.2012 22:04 Arjen wrote:0.0.100? Landmark! When can we expect... well... 0.1.0? ;)

On 24.5.2012 00:29 chris wrote:As soon as I get spoilers done, and the in game help files updated, and those last few weaponmaster classes done, and any remaining outstanding issues completed, and get a little bit of code cleanup, and ... I will cut 1.0!!

Any day now ;D

On 24.5.2012 00:34 chris wrote:[CL26:DL18] 02:12
I'm almost ready for the Barrow Downs. I figure on the skeleton for hold life, but maybe I'll try the Zombie. At the moment, the fail rate is high, the upkeep significant (even at 1) and the -6 wisdom annoying. At least with the skeleton's -2 wisdom and no upkeep, I can endure a long quest. There is also the hobbit, and they get awesome stealth and a *huge* +1 wisdom. Not much fighting skill but perhaps it won't matter?

Stealth courtesy of the Variant Maintainer whose last musings were on the discrepency between the number of player melee blows and those of monsters. Silly guy ...

So far I'm feeling quite powerful, but its hard to tease out Monk power from Doppelganger power, so I could use some outside opinions. The lack of regen while in form is pretty big and for the first time ever, the Nature spell Cure Wounds and Poison gets used for healing! Of course, one really needs to be able to find a nice quiet place to rest every now and then.

On 24.5.2012 14:57 chris wrote:I think I will tweak the form update costs again. I just hit on morphing into a Human and picking Fast Learner which somehow feels like cheating. So, I could make the only "free" races be those with less than 100% xp (kobold, snotling, yeek, imp) which would make humans pay an upkeep of 1 per round (which actually is significant in the early game, but less so later on).

However, I like having more "free" races as options, since upkeeps are pretty huge in the early game (I might kill 10k monsters during stat gain and maybe 13k to 15k for a winner ... The early game is a slog thru never ending hordes of weaklings spiced with an occasional insta-killer). So, we could alternatively address the Human/Demigod power choice issue, which I feel is a bit too powerful to give them free choice. If we made the choice random, would that be better?

On 24.5.2012 15:07 chris wrote:(BTW, the 10k stat gain number is the high end for hanging out at L30 to L34 for stat potions ... You can speed this up by skimming the top of anti-melee caves or dragon's lair, if you are bold!)

On 24.5.2012 16:26 Arjen wrote:Random power? Don't humans/demigods not have too many powers to make the choice random? Maybe if you split them in caster/melee/ranged with a 4th group which can always be picked. If you need to polymorph several times before you get something actual useful sounds very annoying.

On 24.5.2012 16:34 chris wrote:You're probably right ... I ended up just taking the easy way out and prohibiting Doppelgangers from picking the Fast Learner ability. Of course, nobody wants to play a human anyway, even with power swapping :)

[CL30:DL34] 04:36
This guy has had real good luck with stat potions so far ... I think the Barrow Downs had 5 and they have been spawning quite quickly in the low L30's. So, a little more experience and I'll start considering the Cloning Pits. Actually, I still need a bit more melee prowess as Gachapin took about 12 rounds to kill, and Ulfang the Black ate me alive in melee forcing me to teleport away 3 times even with my 142 AC at the time. He was tougher than Grendel for some unfathomable reason, though Grendel was no cakewalk either.

Here's a Tonberry pose. Only 4 blows while many races now get 5, but quite effective. However, I still can't bring myself to tolerate the speed biff ... And actually, I'm still going with the Kobold as my main choice.

On 24.5.2012 18:21 chris wrote:[CL33:Cloning Pits] 05:35
Well, just under 6k kills for this guy ... But I had good breaks including finding a lot of stat potions and not just that. They all seemed to be stat boosts I cared about! When my phial replacement spawned nicely and I scored a !Experience as well as a so-so ring of damage, I decided the Pits were on!

Shadow-Fairy for stealth and levitation, but a quick change to the kobold for any sort of fighting. I hate doing the quest without chaos but it turns out I did not need to use any curing at all! Why was that? Well, an early Anarion drop came with Chaos as an unkown resistance.

10 Artifacts in the quest and some Frodo boots for a reward.

And the kobold form now gets 6 attacks. Sigh, that race always seems to be miles ahead of all the others. But at this point, with all my shinies, I think I'll play the Nibelung instead.
Otherwise, the quest was straightforward. Grendels and Rogrogs were my only serious damage producers. Grendels ... well, yeah, we expect them to kick butt being the hardest hitters in the quest these days. But Rogrogs? Well, I insisted on fighting as a yeek! Nuff said ... And only one of Rogrog's attacks are acid after all, so the immunity probably wasn't worth it.

On 24.5.2012 19:25 chris wrote:[CL39:DL60] 06:02
Who can beat the Kobold? No other race even comes close ... As a Nibelung, I took 57 rounds to kill a Hell Wyrm and had to heal twice (5 blows for 225 dam). Now I want a rematch, but this time as a Kobold King (6 blows for 382 dam). It won't even be close ;)

On 24.5.2012 19:54 Arjen wrote:If Kobold is your first race as Doppelganger and he beats every other race, isn't the rest just a bit too weak? :)

On 24.5.2012 20:24 chris wrote:Doppelgangers are OP because they let you play as a kobold :D

[CL45:Node of Nature] 07:51
Once I picked up nether resistance, I rolled the Old Castle using a staff of holiness for the titans. With my stealth, I was able to get the jump on everything and let me tell you: Fighting 1 Raals at a time is waaaay easier than taking on 4 at once.

I scored the Palantir as expected, and swapping out my dextrous phial means I forgo that last attack ... At least for now. With a kobold one never needs to wait too long.

Having completed the Node of Nature, I spammed casting spells for experience. I always do this, and it makes the whole spell experience system rather annoying for me. But, rather than remove it, I might fix it. For example, the game could detect spell spamming by looking at your experience on each cast or something similar. Would people hate me if I made this change? I know I would ... ;)

I figure I will need to ride the Kobold til about 5Mxp or so, perhaps longer. As soon as any other race gets all attacks, then ... and only then ... will it be time to even consider a swap. Any race after the yeek melees pitifully, with damage 450 or less while the kobold crushes for 580. Monk power is almost totally indexed to player level!

On 25.5.2012 01:16 chris wrote:[CL47:DL60] 08:21
Hmmm ... Its actually not until L47 that a monk gets their last attack. If I go back to the Palantir than I need to wait until L49, which is like what? 30 minutes from now?

I'm still waiting on resistances anyway.

On 25.5.2012 16:04 chris wrote:[CL49:DL61] 09:13
Wow, what a crazy level. I've managed about 6 arts (some random) so far and *still* the level is special. I've had to kill Tulscha (!) and Julian, the latter since he kept pulling me out of the vault and wasting my precious time. Inventory slots are non-existant, so I simply can't keep what I am finding.

The only hard uniques left are Tiamat and Mycen, but Mycen is friendly. Thank goodness since I still can't find sound resistance (form of Beastman?).

Kobold damage = 643. Most everything else is still in the 400's ...

On 25.5.2012 16:49 chris wrote:Wow, monsters are behaving really intelligently for some reason ... Certainly, I did not design this. But they won't come at me until I rest in my weakened form, at which point they race to get me! And since doppelgangers don't regen at all, I need to rest often! The result: I'm a weak piddling doppelganger with nary a hit point, facing down some mountain of menace and I need to waste 3 turns to transform, put up double resistance and stone skin! This has happened 6 times so far in this vault and I can't figure out why monsters are behaving this way, but I like it.

A tag team of Ancalagon and Narse nearly did me in, and I had to quaff *Healing* since inventory woes made me jettison my potion of healing and my staff of healing. And rods are too risky. And the stupid Narse brain smash had me blinded!

On 25.5.2012 16:52 chris wrote:Oh, and here is [CL50:DL61] 09:29
With a 300AC no less, but wearing Rohirrim cranks that down to 217. Hmmm ...

On 25.5.2012 17:58 chris wrote:OK, kobolds are now 90% xp, similar to the imp. I actually think kobolds are superior to humans even with the special ability, at least for any race that needs fighting skills. Poison resist is rather hard to get and is absolutely essential to have fairly early on the game. And +1 Str/Dex together with +10 fighting skills? C'mon!

If we are to have a 55% fast gaining race, then it really should be the yeek. When yeeks were first created (in Drangband) they were just that. Super weak but with an ultra low xp requirement.

So here is a [Yeek] monk which is much inferior to the [Kobold].

On 25.5.2012 18:04 chris wrote:Ha! Originally Yeeks were -5 to all stats, crappy skills, 6HD and 25% xp. Anybody want to see that restored?

On 25.5.2012 18:37 Arjen wrote:Nope :) I like playing Yeeks if I want acid immunity. ;) But with -5 everything they will just suck and I won't use them like 50% of the races.

On 25.5.2012 20:41 Arjen wrote:It's a bit insane that a well-trained Half Titan monk hits are weaker than those of a well-trained kobold... I'll choose the Kobold if I'm the one on the receiving end of the punches. :) Unless I want my head to come of with the first punch.

On 25.5.2012 21:20 chris wrote:Its all about level with the monk ... Well, dex matters a little.

[CL46:DL61] 10:05
Even weakened, I still think the kobold is my best form at the moment. Yeeks and snotlings also get 7 blows but don't fight as well.

I've added an object count field to the character dump so that I can get a handle on how many objects a typical character will see in a game. This will allow me to interpret my object frequency data a bit better ... Of course, this field does leak a little information since I count the objects as they are generated. I'll probably remove the field in the future.

But in a single level (L61) I found 510 objects. Nothing special ... The level started with 16 objects on it (I have Call Sunlight, so I could see those objects anyway). But a MH dragon nest caused most of the balance to be generated. Characters literally drown in all the object drops! Fortunately, Hengband threw us a life preserver in the form of the automizer :)

(Note: Treasures do not count as objects)

On 25.5.2012 23:29 chris wrote:[CL47:DL67] 10:40
I finally did DQII for the ?AC and got:
The Pair of Dragon Wings 'Grand Master Mystic' [4,+26] (+4) {StDxCn;PoShCfNtDiFe}

Now that's amazing! It had {PoShNtDi} to begin with ...

And finally I found some rings of speed. 4 on the same level, in fact, though one was cursed. I'll have to let Tiamat off the hook since my pack is full, but she is next on my list!

On 26.5.2012 02:34 chris wrote:[CL48:DL72] 11:27
Anyone know the record for highest AC? 357 has got to be pretty darn close. In fact, I can't wait to trade in form some sweet 'zerker gloves!

The kobold is L49 and even my native form is L45. This means I can become the spectre, but only at L40. Hmmm ... I need what, like 15 Mxp with that guy? I might as well be Zeus!

On 26.5.2012 04:19 chris wrote:[CL50:DL72] 12:25
Infernal Deal to counteract the no regen?

On 26.5.2012 06:16 OmniNegro@hotmail.com wrote:Does shapechanger not count as a racial selection? And also not count as a type like Mighty/Pious?

The character dump clearly says you are a Monk, so it is not class either. Is it an option in the game like the whole list of options including "Easy mode" and all the rest?

Or is it your race? It would probably make more sense that way, but I thought only Demigods could choose the "Infernal Deal"?

I love reading the characters you make Chris. (And The dumps by the few others who do them regularly.) This sort of thing is why Chengband is the best *Band game ever. Every few days there is a new version with not only new options, but new character dumps showing those new options being used. :) :) :)

And not that my vote counts, but 357 AC is ludicrously high.

Regardless of all that, I thank you for showing us your characters. (If you are not Chris, but also do this, please accept my thanks as being directed at you too. )

On 26.5.2012 11:58 Daniel Fishman wrote:+1 to the "thankyou for posting the characters" sentiment. I'm rubbish at Cheng but reading your character dumps encourages me to keep trying :)

The Doppelganger is a race that can mimic other races. In fact, if they don't mimic other races, they are super weak (-3 all stats and only 6HD). Which races they are allowed to mimic depends on level: As they advance they gain access to better races. When they mimic a race, they become that race in every respect (stat and skill adjustments, racial powers, racial bonuses, xp adjustments, sp adjustments, hit dice, etc). For Beastman, they gain a bunch of mutations randomly (though the first one is always good). For Humans and Demigods, they get to repick their powers! This might be a bit too much but I'm not sure about alternatives. But otherwise, since doppelgangers are just another race, you play the game just like everybody else (class/personality/etc.). Spoilers can be found here:

http://code.google.com/p/chengband/wiki/AutoDoppelgangerSpoilers

Hengband and Chengband has always had the concept of mimicking other races, but only in spell form. If you look on the ladder, you might see characters whose race reads [Demon], [Demon lord] or [Vampire]. These come from characters casting spells available to the Daemon or Death realms, and are quite useful since these "races" are way more powerful then normal character races. Also, with Chengband, I added a bunch of golem polymorph spells to the Craft realm ([Clay Golem], [Iron Golem], [Mithril Golem] and [Colossus]). Details may be found here:

http://code.google.com/p/chengband/wiki/AutoMimicRacesSpoilers

With any form of mimicry, it can be removed by Dispel Magic. Monsters are fairly smart about when to use Dispel Magic, and the more powerful the race you mimic, the more likely they are to dispel it. And for the Doppelganger, this is especially dangerous since their native race is so incredibly weak!

On 27.5.2012 08:19 OmniNegro@hotmail.com wrote:So you can shapechange into a Demigod and pick powers custom to the situation? That seems very abusable if you can avoid the dispelling ability, and I recall one of the Demigod abilities does exactly that.

"One with Magic" and "Weird Mind" are natural choices for a Doppelganger. And once you have confusion resistance from equipment or class, "One with Magic" and "Infernal Deal" are even better.

How would "Merchant's Friend" work for a Doppelganger Demigod after they choose another race? Would the items they chose to be kept in a shop stay put or fade with the choice being changed?

Would the *ID* from "Loremaster" be spamable for the mere price of switching races a few times?

On 27.5.2012 17:42 chris wrote:OK, I think the best option is to let the doppelganger pick their Human/Demigod powers, but to remember their choices. Next time they shift to Human or Demigod, they simply regain the power they previously chose. And the Human choice counts as the first demigod choice, so you only get to pick two powers. So choose wisely!

Beastman can still scum for a good mutation set, but I am OK with that.

On 10.6.2012 02:56 chris wrote:[CL48:DL87] 13:19
Ares? I only ever seem to be able to tackle Olympians with monks, for some reason. I teleported Hera and Zeus away, and that left Ares relatively helpless. Still, I had to disengage and regenerate for more Herbal Healing ... That guy can really lay on the damage!

On 10.6.2012 03:16 chris wrote:[CL48:DL87] 13:34
Apollo was fairly weak too ... I need to start playing more melee characters, I guess. Actually, his next to last move was his most deadly: Summon Fenghuang!

On 16.6.2012 00:51 chris wrote:[CL50:DL100] 17:01
Frustrated by my resistance holes (Great Cthulhu led with unresisted nexus), I decided I'd just push for the win. But Oberon reminded me I also lack blindness resist, but fortunately he did not keep me perma-blinded. Recall for dragon gloves and a rematch, which wasn't too close, but wasn't particularly easy either.

Then, load up for the J. He didn't mind my Tonberry form too much, so I only caught a handful of dispels.